preparing the stoves for cooking
cutting up the veggies
After cooking the food, the children lined up so that we could serve them cafeteria style. I was in charge of the cabbages which actually really reminded a lot of kimchee which I miss a LOT since there are no korean restaurants in Kisumu. I can just imagine BCD tofu house right now ... with the steaming hot beef soon dooboo and fried fish ..mmm
some of the children beginning to form a line (sadly, they will probably experience K-town or the deliciousness of BCD tofu house)
As expected, one by one, the children happily took their overflowing bowls of food back to the classroom to eat. That is, until one of the girls refused to take one of the bowls that was given to her - it turns out that she didn't like cabbage or any other veggies for that matter! Clearly, a harsh punishment was in order.
that's what you get for not eating your veggies!
Just kidding, that was just a video of cutting the meat before putting it in the pot. Anyway, I thought it was funny/ironic that in the United States, in reponse to picky eaters, parents often tell their children something along the lines of, "you should be happy for the food that you have - there are starving children in Africa!" I guess the kids in America can now respond to their parents that even some of those children in Africa would not want to eat their veggies.
the children eating their food in the classroom
Evans, 4 yrs old, is one of the youngest kidsthese boys still need to learn how to use a spoon
After all the children and volunteers had finished eating, in true American fashion, we had lots of leftovers (this was because a group of the kids did not show up due to family/personal issues that weekend). I'm not really sure what happened to the leftovers - whether someone took them home or they had to be thrown out - but it reminded me of a conversation I had the previous week during our safari.
Michael was telling us that at his college, a Kenyan who had been recruited as a runner cried the first time he saw the school dining hall. Like many colleges, the meals were served buffet style and was simply overflowing with such a variety of food and cuisines in quantities that the Kenyan had never seen before. I interpreted the weeping to mean that he was so overcome with joy at the an unending abundance of deliciousness, a confirmation that America was truly the land of plenty, and that he had finally "made it" by coming to the United States and being able to eat like a king.
The Kenyan tourguide who was with us however, suggested that maybe he was crying because he knew how much food was going to be hrown out, and wasted - especially in light of the kind of conditions he knew his family, friends, and countrymen faced. In reponse, the German nurse who was with us on the safari said that in a world of roughly 6 billion people, humans produce enough food to feed roughly 12 billion people. However, much of that surplus is thrown away/destroyed to protect the price of the food.
Now, I don't know if those numbers are right or what she said about protecting the price of food is the main incentive for all the waste or inequity - I would suspect that poor distribution networks/infrastructure/lack of good storage facilities/good old fashioned corruption/etc would also contribute a great deal to food not reaching people - but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to consider how a lot of today's world shortage problem might not be so much a matter of growing enough food, but rather getting the food to the people who need them. To be honest, I don't really know that much about this topic or have any real solutions, but doing a pretty quick google search led me to this article which I thought was interesting.
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